📡 Nick Saban encourages people to be patient, remains hopeful players can return to campus over the summer - Yahoo Sports

[Bama News]

Nick Saban encourages people to be patient, remains hopeful players can return to campus over the summer

Saban, like everyone else, doesn't know what the 2020 college football season could look like.

sports.yahoo.com

Nick Saban would like everyone to have a little patience.

The Alabama coach was on the Paul Finebaum Show on Wednesday and said he was hopeful that players could return to their college campuses “sometime this summer” ahead of the college football season. But he first urged people to continue to take their social distancing responsibilities seriously during the continued coronavirus pandemic.

"I really think we just got to be patient, stay focused on what’s in front of us, try to do the best we can but follow the rules,” Saban said via Al.com. “Stay home, practice social distancing, wash your hands. I do think they’re making scientific progress here, so maybe we’ll have a breakthrough here in two weeks, a couple weeks, and we can get back to normal.”

That message of continued vigilance from Saban may have more effect than it would coming from Gov. Kay Ivey. Especially if it means that the chances of football returning sooner rather than later are increased.

Saban said Alabama was doing “as much research as we can” regarding testing programs for players and staff. And he, like many others, said he had no idea what football could look like when it returns.

"But I don’t think anybody knows what is college football gonna look like. What is any football gonna look like? Are we gonna have seats in-between fans? Are we gonna come up with a solution that allows people to go to games? Are we gonna have to test people to get into stadiums? Are we gonna have to play games with nobody? Or are we even gonna be able to play games at all?”

Saban’s comments came after Stadium published the results of a poll of all top-level athletic directors. Over 80 of the 114 ADs who responded to the survey said they believed the 2020 college football season would be delayed in some form. There was no consensus about the type or length of a delay.

Saban has previously said that he hoped teams could have a 14-day break-in period before fall camp for teaching and conditioning purposes. That would seem to be a best-case scenario for an on-time start to the season at this point. With two weeks of training before four weeks of preseason practices, college athletes would need to be back by the middle of July. Without a two-week break-in period, football players would need to be back at the beginning of August.

Is that feasible for all 130 FBS schools across the country? It’s incredibly hard to say yes at the moment. We could have some clarity about the potential start of the 2020 season on Thursday after a meeting of the NCAA Division I Football Oversight Committee.

 

[bama alum]

A couple of weeks? Coach must not get his info from mainstream media, which only reports doom and gloom re: COVID-19.

 

[JoseyWalesTheOutlaw]

I love Alabama college football but this country is in a world of sh*t at this time.